“This project is probably a quintessential example of the opportunities created by the Eagle Ford Shale” in southern Bexar County, Ortiz says.

Yet, ask him how many other developers he's represented in City South, and he struggles. He can come up with just this one client, Southton Rail Yard LLC.

That's saying a lot considering the breadth of the area covered by the City South Management Authority: 63 square miles on the South Side, hemmed in by Loop 410 to the north, Loop 1604 to the south, I-37 to the east and I-35 to the west.

Then-Mayor Ed Garza first sketched out City South on a napkin a decade ago. The idea was to impose planning and zoning controls on the unincorporated area due south so that when development finally arrives, spurred on by the Toyota and later Texas A&M, it wouldn't look like the concrete and asphalt riot on the North Side.

CSMA's residential rules require low-density homebuilding in some areas — to maintain their scrubby agrarian character — and niceties like front porches and detached garages in others. The scheme is New Urbanist, the aim of which is to create tight-knit, walkable communities.

About eight years after City Council brought it to life, the city of San Antonio is preparing to dismantle the City South dream state.

The Planning and Community Development Department is overhauling the city's annexation policy; at the council's recommendation last December, it's simultaneously choosing which chunks of City South it'll pick up in limited-purpose annexations and which parts it'll allow to revert to zoning-free unincorporated territory.

Under limited-purposed annexation, an area's homeowners and businesses don't have to pay city property taxes, but they do have to live with city planning and zoning regs.

Chris Looney, an assistant director in the planning department, thinks the process will be wrapped up by year's end.

It's not hard to see why City South is nearly kaput. Since 2005, CSMA has seen one residential development that's actually worked out — Hunter's Pond near Palo Alto College. But more importantly, a small but vocal group of property owners have bemoaned the blanket-like effect they say its land-use rules have had on property values, and developers have griped loudly about its Byzantine and costly regulations.

Builders see City South “as an impediment,” Ortiz says. “There is definitely a perception issue with CSMA.” He then adds it's more than a perception issue.

It's more expensive to build under City South rules, and those extra costs inevitably get passed on to buyers. Talking about the complexities of New Urban development, Looney says, “The market was never there for that because it's a little bit more expensive.”

But zoning rules and extra costs didn't kill City South by themselves. The Great Recession dried up huge pools of construction financing, especially for largely untested markets like the far South Side. Just as important, homebuyers and renters weren't clamoring to live there, and not many companies were eager to move in.

Years from now, when the Texas A&M campus north of Toyota's truck plant has taken root and the student population is well on its way to 25,000, the growth that Garza so badly wanted to manage will have arrived.

Meanwhile, the San Antonio Water System's $103.5-million, 32-mile South Bexar County sewer pipeline is expected to come online by the end of the year, opening up big tracts of land mostly north of the Medina River for potential development.

And then there's the Eagle Ford Shale promise that Ortiz talks about.

While the city picks and chooses the swaths of City South it wants, a report released last fall — in which the consulting firm TXP Inc. of Austin mapped out City South's weaknesses... and strengths — offers a few clues about which areas the city might embrace.

Near the end of the 86-page report is a map highlighting five regions on CSMA's turf with growth potential — “nodes,” if you're a planning nerd. The logistics and distribution node is on City South's western edge, hugging I-35; the industrial node encompasses Toyota's truck plant; the higher-ed node clusters around the budding A&M campus; the commercial node lines up against Loop 410; and the energy, or Eagle Ford, node sits just off I-37.

If the activity that the map anticipates comes about, the epitaph for City South will be the inverse of “Too little too late” — something you can say about many of the city's efforts to regulate North Side development over the last few decades.

The inscription on City South's gravestone will be: “Too much too early.”

Greg Jefferson is business editor of the San Antonio Express-News. You can reach him at (210) 250-3259 or gjefferson@express-news.net.